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Friday, October 31, 2014

Our Moodle Moment focuses on a synchronous tool this time, as we take a look at Zoom. Zoom is a lightweight videoconferencing and screensharing tool supported by the AEAs. Similar to Skype, it allows multiple users and easy recording.

While there is a paid version that allows you to have longer meetings (> 1 hour), the free version also the same basic features. It integrates with phone conferencing, and participants do not need an account to join a meeting (not even a free account).

Below is the complete overview of the video and all its features back when we first started using the tool in March.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

AEA PD Online, on behalf of the statewide AEA system and the Iowa
Department of Education, seeks a part-time online community facilitator
(25 hours per week) for the 2014-15 school year. The position will being
immediately and will be working with the Iowa Department of Education
and the statewide planning committee to support the development of the
Teacher Leadership Compensation online community, in addition to other
technical assistance activities.

This position will help maintain and
support the Teacher Leadership Compensation (TLC) online community,
which includes aggregating community content and events, supporting the
user experience and maintaining the technical design of the community.
Skills in website development, online community facilitation and
management, social media, online technologies, marketing and promotion
are necessary.

Minimum requirements include a bachelor’s degree in
communications, English, marketing, web development or a related field.
This person should be motivated to work in a team environment as well as
to work with K-12 educators from across Iowa. Previous experience in
K-12 education is a plus.

Have you ever used video in an online or blended class and wondered what students were getting from the video? Have you wanted to emphasize a specific part of a video or connect additional resources to the video? If you have, TEDEd Lessons Worth Sharing is for you.

TEDEd Lessons allows you to wrap introductory text, short answer or multiple choice questions, additional resources and discussions around your videos. To find out how view the video below or click on the link here.

The article is worth the read and isn't very long. It includes examples of what it actually could look like. It provides a clear reference to outcomes and connections of specific assignments to those course outcomes. The author of this article goes on to say that using a graphic display is a way to "keep student learning in focus". There are benefits for the students as well. "Graphical displays are clearer to visual learners, they show how a course is organized, and they function as a map to a course."

How can this apply to your online course? Sometimes online students don't seem to "get it". They

appear to just wander through the course without making the connections, in spite of our best efforts, to the course objectives/outcomes/essential learnings. Providing a visual representation of those connections to specific assignments may be enough to get the learner to focus their learning and they will see that "none of the course assignments are random or arbitrary."

Challenge:
If you are thinking about revising your online course, think about adding a graphical image of your course objectives and assignments. It could be just what you and your online students need to move their learning, and yours, forward.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

October
19-25 is Digital Citizenship Week. The purpose of the week is to engage
students, teachers, and

families in a conversation about what it means to
behave responsibly and respectfully online.

AEA PD Online
can help educators start these important conversations with students and
parents. It offers 6 self-paced modules, which can be completed anytime and anywhere, that will prepare educators to assist students
into becoming good digital citizens.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Our Moodle Moment today looks at a plugin within our Moodle systems. This plugin is available free from the Moodle.org website. It is called PoodLL, and it actually is a suite of plugins that allow you to do many different things, including audio recording and video recording.

The most common use of it is as an assignment type. On our systems, when you add an assignment, you can make it accept PoodLL submissions, which means students can records themselves for their assignment instead of typing it out. You can also do the same thing in forum posts and anywhere else in the site where students would normally have to type.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

AEA PD Online's eCurriculum content for Physical Education

Did you know that AEA PD Online K-12 System has online content created by teachers that can be used in a Physical Education course. Check out these (additional content is added all the time so come back often) :

Looking for license renewal or graduate credit? We offer many online courses in a variety of areas.

Now, you can check out our downloadable course catalog (pdf), which lists our titles, as well as their descriptions and instructors. When you find a course that interests you, be sure to visit our registration site and search for the next available section of that course.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Is Anyone There?

Hello and welcome to the AEA
PD Online’s first “Friday Feature”.

AEA PD Online will be
hosting a series called Friday Feature
twice a month. The goal of the Friday Feature is to highlight things AEA PD Online
does, as well as provide information about online teaching and learning.

So, let’s talk about instructor presence in an online
course. If you have ever been a student in an online course, you may have
experienced differing levels of instructor presence—depending on the course,
the topic, the instructor, etc. Maybe the only interaction you experienced with
the instructor was getting your grade. Or, maybe the instructor was engaged in
conversations with you as an individual, and/or with the class as a whole through
discussion forums, chats, emails, announcements, etc. Which instructor do you
prefer? How do you know if the instructor is present?

Instructor presence is one
of the factors that many online students comment on most often in course
evaluations. What is instructor presence? Since students don’t physically “see”
the instructor, a sense of instructor presence is created through the way the
course is designed and delivered. Video chats for virtual office hours, photos,
narratives, a welcoming video introduction—all easy things to create—can
provide students with an “image” of who the instructor is in their online
course. Instructors need to spend a little bit of time, before the course
begins, setting up the classroom online environment.

Once the course is in
session, online instructors can add announcements, post to discussion boards,
provide feedback on assignments, upload photos or videos, email students—both
individually and to the class as a whole—all of which will provide “evidence of
engagement” to online students.

Online instructors can also
directly ask students for feedback throughout the course. Feedback can be
anonymous. For example, at the end of a unit you might ask, “Was this
information clear, or were there any points you didn’t understand?”
Face-to-face teachers do this all the time—so can online instructors. Online
instructors can also ask questions specifically about their role as an
instructor, such as:

·Is the
timeliness of my response helpful?

·Are the types of
responses you are getting helpful?

·Is there
anything else I could be doing to help you?

If you, as in online
instructor, ask for student feedback, then you also had better be ready to
respond to it, and you may even want to implement some of their suggestions in
the current online course.

So—what tools can you use to
help create this sense of instructor presence? The use of audio and video can
be easily incorporated into an online course. Moodle has some built-in tools
that can be used by both students and instructors—it is called “PoodLL”.

Using PoodLL, online
instructorsand their students can:

·Record Audio: Record your voice or other audio input and
save it directly into an MP3 file.